Doug Read Builds a Wedding Guest Book with Twilio

When Doug Read got in touch with us to share his wedding guest book app, we were touched by the fact that he thought of us when making plans to launch a wedding website, and excited to see what he had come up with.

We won’t be linking to the site here, since it is live and somewhat personal, but we got the go ahead to show you some screen shots and Doug’s thoughts on building voice enabled applications on the Twilio Voice API.

How the Wedding Guest Book App Works

This application enables Doug’s wedding guests to sign their online guestbook over the
phone. Guests call into Doug’s Twilio phone number and leave a message, which then appears on the website.

Other users and us
can go look at the transcribed messages later and play back the audio recording.

Interview with the Developer: Doug Read

I also wanted to have people be able to call in and get basic information about the
wedding. There are so many features an API like this opens up.

What did you think of developing with Twilio?

The documentation and API libraries enabled me to build a working application in
a very short amount of time. The only drawback to developing with GAE and Twilio was the lack of a testable development environment. This made the
testing phase much more painful.

If you had all the time in the world, what Twilio app would you build?

Home automation integration, so i could tell different parts of my home spoken
complex commands.

Any advice you have for other developers and/or feedback for us on making

the developer experience even better?

Like a said above a real sandboxed
test environment would be very helpful. As to advice, i would say play
around with the working example programs. Also the debugger under your
account is very useful for finding out the request lifecycle.

Congratulations to Doug and Jenn!

From all of us here at Twilio, we hope you have a wonderful wedding filled with wonderful memories – and we’re proud to be among the tools you will use to capture the experience. As an early wedding gift, we’re giving Doug $50 in Twilio credit. Congratulations, and thanks for all the feedback.

Share Your Twilio App With the World

Have you built a Twilio application you’d like to share? We’d love to publish a story about your application here on our blog, across the social networks we’re a member of, and add your creation to Twilio Apps on the Map. Drop us a line anytime at help@twilio.com so we can learn more about you and what you’ve built.